Making Historical Dress: Hands, bodies and methods

Lead Research Organisation: De Montfort University
Department Name: School of Fashion and Textiles

Abstract

Making clothing is a fundamentally corporeal experience. Yet histories of dress, textiles, and manufacture often lack awareness or acknowledgement of the physicality of garment making. Such processes were rarely captured in text, and extant material objects usually only represent the finished product. The Making Historical Dress Network will bring into conversation and flatten traditional hierarchies between a diverse range of scholars and practitioners who have recognised this lacuna and taken to their needles to recapture practical sewing knowledge of the past. Through these 'embodied' approaches, garment construction can be reverse engineered, lost skills can be recovered, and instructions and diagrams can be tested. Recreative methods push back against the narratives of professionalised and masculine production, which dominate the archive. Attention to historic practices of manual making offers a mouthpiece to labourers, particularly women and BAME makers, who are often obscured in guild records and industrialist accounts. Vitally, recreation recovers the manual skills devalued by present-day fast fashion. It illuminates and retrieves the physical human labour required to make clothing, which historic narratives around and current practices of mass manufacture have diminished.

Experimental methodologies are well established in disciplines such as archaeology and technical art history but have only recently gained traction amongst historians, as recreation and practical approaches have often remained outside the academy. The recent 'making' and 'embodied' turns, led largely by dress historians, have asked scholars to consider how these objects interacted with and were formed by historical bodies. Existing scholarship, such as the work of Arnold and Tiramani in Theatrical Costume Studies and Hohti Erichsen and Pitman in History, has been fragmented along disciplinary and professional lines. However, this approach has gained accelerated traction amongst scholars following the launch of Tiramani's School of Historical Dress in 2012 and Davidson's 2019 article. Simultaneously, the growth of historical recreation on YouTube and Instagram since 2018 (recognised as a fashion phenomenon by Vogue in 2021) has created a global community of historical makers, who generate knowledge outside of the academy.

Despite the field's growth, there is little cohesion or field-wide acceptance of key terms and methods. Research in this field has been undertaken by scholars and practitioners fragmented across the UK, USA, Europe, and Australia, working on different periods, or employed outside traditional academic institutions. The Making Historical Dress Network will unite established and emerging scholars of dress across the disciplines of History, Literature, Art History, and Cultural Studies with practitioners in the worlds of costume production, curation, and conservation, as well as the social media community of historical costumers. In doing so, the network will provide a forum for the discussion and establishment of a shared fundamental rubric for the field. The network will address the lack of diversity within the field, a particular challenge for the academy, by illuminating the work of diverse and enslaved makers of the past and raising up the voices of BAME practitioners. This network will consolidate existing fragmented work, co-create knowledge with non-academic practitioners, and enable participants to establish field-defining best practice.

Publications

10 25 50
 
Title 1690s Mantua 
Description A recreation of a 1690s mantua gown. 
Type Of Art Artefact (including digital) 
Year Produced 2024 
Impact - value of collaborative recreation - advancement of understanding of the construction of a garment which is fundamental to the development of the modern fashion industry - increased networking between international communities of historical garment makers 
 
Description This award has very successfully achieved its key aim of fostering a more integrated and communicative international community of scholars and practitioners engaging with making as a historical methodology in fashion history. Terms, methods, and approaches have been discussed at length, and Dyer and Bendall have identified the significant areas of consistency and divergence across the field, which will be articulated in the forthcoming article and book. The roles of scientific language, creativity, collaboration, and skill deficit have all been illuminated through the network. We have also explored at length opportunities for alternative ways of capturing tacit knowledge, including video, digital renderings, and augmented reality.
Exploitation Route There are clear opportunities for digital advancements within this area. This tackles issues around sustainability and waste in the physical recreation of garments, and opens up new opportunities to capture historic making skill banks, to render digitally fabrics no longer materially achievable (due to changes in fibre production etc), and to translate tacit knowledge. There are also opportunities for further collaborative making enterprises, which explore the roles and dymanics within historic work environments, as well as work around the de/revaluabtion of labour within the garment industry.
Sectors Creative Economy

Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software)

Education

Culture

Heritage

Museums and Collections

 
Description Our recreative work has resulted in a number of 'myth-busting' media and broadcast outputs, working with the BBC, Historic Royal Palaces, and National Trust. The impacts centre on the improved quality of creative outputs in the broadcast and heritage sectors. Two collaborative recreations were made adjacent to this grant, one of which is the central focus of a BBC History Extra documentary on the de/revaluation of sartorial labour. This will impact public perceptions of garment labour. The gown will also be part of the exhibition Dress to Impress at Polesden Lacy in 2025 in a video presented and edited by Dyer. This will impact public perceptions of women's bodies and their relationships with their clothing. These recreations have also been used as part of pedagogical practice within higher education at DMU, London College of Fashion, and New York University to enhance student understanding of historic making practice, especially around efficient and zero-waste approaches to pattern cutting.
First Year Of Impact 2024
Sector Education,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections
Impact Types Cultural

 
Description Commercialising Remaking The Business of Making Historical Dress 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Online workshop/roundtable on the commercial dimension of recreation.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2024
URL https://makinghistoricaldress.dmu.ac.uk/Commercialising-Remaking.html
 
Description Deconstruction, Alteration and Recreation: Stories from Australian and New Zealand Collections 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Online event exploring recreation work in Australia and New Zealand
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2024
URL https://makinghistoricaldress.dmu.ac.uk/Stories-from-Australia.html
 
Description Making Historical Dress Festival 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact A two-day festival attended by 100 in person and and 500 online participants which explored themes from the network, including collaboration, digital recreation, methodologies, and translation of tacit knowledge.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2024
URL https://makinghistoricaldress.dmu.ac.uk/Festival.html
 
Description Making Historical Dress Website 
Form Of Engagement Activity Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact Our project website was launched in Spring 2023. We have added a collaboratively produced bibliography, as well as recordings of our events. The event recordings have been viewed over 500 times.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023,2024
URL https://makinghistoricaldress.dmu.ac.uk/
 
Description Workshop One - Replicas, Reconstructions, and Recreations: Defining Terms of Historical Making 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Currently, there is little cohesion or even field-wide acceptance of key terms and methods relating to making practices in dress history. Terms range from 'experimental history' (here borrowing from archaeology) to 'reconstruction', 'remaking' and 're-creating' to name a few. This workshop worked towards defining these methodological approaches in dress history and develop a field-wide consensus on how we should discuss experimental making practices. We hosted two keynotes and nine speakers, as well as an online audience of over 200.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
URL https://makinghistoricaldress.dmu.ac.uk/Workshop-One.html
 
Description Workshop Three, Learning from Making: Methods and Processes 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact 12 workshop participants shared experiences of methodologies applied within recreative practice in dress history.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2024
URL https://makinghistoricaldress.dmu.ac.uk/Workshop-Three.html
 
Description Workshop Two- Translating Making Knowledge: Communicating Embodied Experience 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Capturing, translating, and communicating the knowledge generated through recreation is a key challenge for the field of dress history. Making knowledge is inherently tacit: it is something we feel, experience, and develop. Just as historians grapple with issues around how to access those experiences, knowledges, and practices amongst past makers, so too do recreative practitioners face the challenge of how to make that personal, experiential knowledge comprehensible to other researchers and the general public. This workshop hosted four keynotes and nine speakers, as well as an online audience of over 200.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
URL https://makinghistoricaldress.dmu.ac.uk/Workshop-Two.html